Mistress Shakespeare (39 page)

Next came Her Majesty’s riderless palfrey, led by her Master of the Horse, then the main members of the nobility. The women wore mourning hoods and cloaks that made them look like nuns. After that followed row upon row of black-clad mourners, from courtiers to servants. The Children of the Chapel Royal went by, the company that performed musicals and plays in the Blackfriars Theatre, which Richard Burbage had leased to them. I saw Robert Cecil and Sir Walter Raleigh, marching at the rear with the Gentlemen Pensioners, who carried their ceremonial halberds pointing down. I felt dizzy with the passing of them all.

From my vantage point, I could barely catch a glimpse of the effigy and coffin as they were carried through the great abbey doors. The end of an era, Dr. Hall had said, and so it was. I was thirty-eight, but suddenly felt so much older.

As the mourners from the procession dispersed, either to go into the abbey or go home, even as the crowd thinned, I stood there yet. The next great procession in London would be held when King James and his entourage arrived from Scotland or perhaps the day of his coronation. The queen is dead; long live the king.

At last, as the shadows lengthened, breathing out cool air from the very abbey stones, I turned to go home. I thought I saw Will up ahead, speaking with a man, but I’d imagined the same whenever I’d seen someone of his stature or gait for months, both in Warwickshire or here—pure wishful thinking. But this man, even capped and caped, did look like Will.

I quickened my steps, just as the other man hurried away and the one I sought turned around and, as if I’d called to him, saw me. Will indeed! My insides cartwheeled. Though my instinct was to rush to him, I halted and stared. His eyes widened, then he squinted—he’d been getting nearsighted the last few years—and smiled. “Anne!” he cried and strode so quickly toward me his black cape flapped like crow’s wings.

I too flew into his arms, nearly knocking him over. He lifted me off the ground and spun me around. “Burbage just told me that you were back,” he said. “I was coming to call after all this, but was afraid I’d find you distraught over the queen.” He put me down and kissed me hard, grappling me to him tightly. He slanted his mouth to get closer, to devour me, it seemed.

I met and matched him move for move and caress for caress, our public place in the street be damned. Frenzy flooded me; of a sudden it was hottest summer. I opened my lips beneath his and our tongues dueled and danced. I felt swept away from my spinning head to the very pit of my belly, when I thought—I had prayed—that such passion had now passed me by. But not with Will. Rampant lust and eternal longing filled me on this day of grieving.

“Anne, Anne,” he gasped when we came up for air. “The truth is, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I knew you’d be here for this.”

“I wasn’t sure you would be,” I said so breathily it did not sound like my voice. I had clamped him to me, my arms around his ribs.

“I wanted to see her buried,” he said simply.

We spoke no more, perhaps fearful of plunging into our old arguments. We held hands, staring into each other’s eyes. Then we were young again, no matter how many years and troubles had gone by. We should not have been so intent on each other, though, for his brother Edmund appeared before we noticed him.

“I—I thought it was you,” the young man stammered, his big brown eyes taking me in. I was certain who he was because he looked so much like Will, who had more or less adopted him. Only five years older than Hamnet would have been, Edmund had ever been Will’s favorite brother. “Anne Whateley,” the boy added, blushing, “Edmund Shakespeare at your service.” He smiled and swept off his cap and made a small bow. Though he was but twenty-three, I saw his hairline was receding precisely as Will’s had.

“Edmund and I watched the procession together,” Will said, loosing only one of my hands, so that Edmund and I could make a proper greeting. “But as usual he was hungry and went to buy some meat pies—with my coins. So where are you hiding them?” he asked, pretending to be grim, as the younger man produced four pies from his satchel with a grand gesture as if he were a magician.

“I hear you are earning a name for yourself at the Curtain,” I said. Had Will told Edmund about us when he’d told no one else? The young man seemed to be taking our presence so matter-of-factly.

“Edmund’s good news,” Will put in, taking a pie and handing it to me before he took one himself, “is that he is in love.”

“I am, truly, for the first and last time ever,” Edmund said, biting into a pie and getting gravy on his chin like the exuberant boy he seemed to be. He spoke with his mouth half full. “She is Frances Wembly, employed by the Mountjoys—wig makers—where Will has put me up. And when I earn enough to wed, we shall do so and both of you will be my guests. Are you still sure you want to go inside the abbey, Will? I’d rather not if—”

“I think Anne will go with me, and I know you have lines to learn and need to see your Frances.”

“She doesn’t like crowds or grieving, so she’s working hard on one of the wigs for the Globe today, a huge one for a fairy queen, I hear.”

“A revival of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
?” I asked.

“You haven’t heard that good news either,” Will told me, squeezing my waist with his free arm. “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men have now become the King’s Men by order of our new monarch.”

“Oh, Will! That’s wonderful! The Monarch’s Merry, Morose and Madcap Men, he should call you.”

Will laughed and Edmund clapped him on the back as if I’d made the wildest jest. “We’re to meet the royal entourage coming down from Scotland at Greenwich Palace with a group of plays prepared,” Will went on. “So as for spending on costumes and wigs, the sky’s suddenly the limit.”

“If you don’t want those pieces I was given from the queen’s wardrobe, I’d like them back—keepsakes,” I said. “And, yes, I’ll go inside the abbey with you, if you vow not to say or do anything to disparage Her Majesty, at least today.”

“No more,” he promised. “I have tried to learn to let the dead rest in peace.”

He and Edmund looked at each other, and Will hit his fist into the boy’s shoulder before he left us. I could tell he was champing at the bit to be off to see his Frances. After we finished our pies and wiped our hands, Will and I walked slowly toward the abbey.

“You told Edmund about me—about us?” I asked.

“Not all, but yes, what a support and help you have been to me these years in London. I swear, the time you’ve been away, it was as if I lost my voice—my muse.” He tucked my wrist in the crook of his arm and pulled it close to his ribs. I began to sniffle for the first time today; in Stratford I’d cried all I could for the queen’s death.

“Anne,” he went on, hanging his head a bit, not looking at me, but his fine, deep actor’s voice was so intense. “I have been so vile to you lately—but that’s because you have been my conscience too, and I could not bear that. I wanted to hate the queen, and you eloquently presented her good points. Like you, I knew Essex and Southampton were wrong, but I wanted them to win.”

“It’s all right, so—”

“It isn’t! And the more we argued, the more I kept telling myself I had to keep away from you, that you were getting in the way of my work, and I had to protect my work at all costs. Then, I realized, you had always protected my work—and me.”

I almost told him that I might have protected his very life when I stood up to Cecil with my own little drama, but I did not want to do anything but etch his words in my head and heart.

“And one more thing. I meant to write this to you, but I must tell you in person,” he said, stopping and looking at me. “You once asked why I did not write you sonnets anymore, and I know you took great offense at the one you read the last night we bedded.”

“Ah, yes, Sonnet 130 about your wretched, ugly mistress.”

“I tried to tell you that night what the couplet was—the bottom lines, as it were. The point of it all was that the woman the poet loved was not idealized or imaginary, but very real—and he loved her yet with any slight flaws she might have.”

“Tell me then, for I recall the rest all too well about dun breasts and black wires for hair.”

“Poetic license—exaggeration, for you are the most beautiful woman—inside and out—I have ever known. But the couplet is:

 

“I see. And, though I have ever refused to dub myself your mistress, I shall never be false to you, poet—and you should know it.”

“Oh, my Anne of rhyming and reasoning,” he whispered as we began to walk again. We both hushed as we walked inside the huge double doors of the cool, dim abbey. And jumped back when, suddenly, the two guards at the door slanted their pikes before our faces.

“Others are still inside—your betters,” one man clipped out, then looked closer at Will. “I seen you on the stage. At court and at the Globe.” He looked at me, as if I should be someone he knew too. “All right then, only up to the entry to the chapel where they laid her. Best to come back next year and see the fine marble effigy, all painted and gilded too, that’s what the new king has ordered for Good Queen Bess.”

“We’ll do that,” Will said as they let us walk under their pikes they lifted as if we passed through a gate. We had heard they would inter the queen in an appropriate place, the Henry VIII Chapel in the north aisle, ironically with her lead coffin placed atop that of her unloved half-sister, “Bloody Mary.” Feeling awed by the place and Will’s words to me, I did not react at first when a familiar figure emerged from the chapel and strode toward us.

“Will,” the cloaked but bareheaded man cried. In the torches still left burning, his long, auburn tresses shone almost as pale as his face. “And Anne!”

“My Lord Southampton!” Will cried and swept him a bow as I curtsied. “But—how long have you been freed from the Tower?”

He looked thin, tired and much older than I recalled, but he seized Will’s hand with vigor. “It was one of the new king’s first decrees, thank God for the queen’s death to make him king! I had to come and see where they’d laid her, so I knew for certain it was ended. I—I will never cease suffering for my dear Lord Essex’s beheading . . .” He had pumped Will’s hand through all that and now he turned to me, tears in his eyes.

“Dearest Anne, yesterday Cecil himself brought me the news I was free and I partly have you to thank for my life too. He said you put in a good word for me the day he questioned you about Will and the players’ part in the rebellion.” He pulled me close and hugged me, then set me back. “You shall see how grateful I can be to both of you. For now, I must be off, so Godspeed to all and God save this king!”

At the entry to the vaulted Henry VIII Chapel, I stood as astounded as Will. We went no farther into the aisle where the queen’s fine tomb would rise one day; he leaned against a massive pillar and held me at arm’s length to stare into my face in the dancing torchlight.

“Cecil?” Will said, looking stunned. “He pulled you in over our part in the rebellion? Why did you not tell me at once?”

“I wasn’t speaking
to
you then, my love, but was only speaking of you. In the end, he and I got on famously, and if you make some jealous or snide remark for that, I shall give you a black eye. Besides, he warned me to tell no one, though since he’s told the earl himself now, I warrant that changes things. Will, in a way I lied to him and yet I managed to tell him the truth too.”

“Ah, my love,” he whispered and pulled me to him, “the consummate actor and author of her own words, the be-all and end-all of my plays and my days. My protector, my muse, my conscience—the wife of my heart. Let us pray on this day on which we buried the queen that we have also buried the tough times we’ve been through. Let’s go out into the sun and treasure our days together.”

In that moment, if the entire massive abbey had fallen down atop me, I would have died quite well content.

CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

I would like to end
my story there, with naught but happiness on the horizon, but that would not be truthful, and I have sought to be so throughout these five acts of my life.

Indeed, times were good for us as Will became the new monarch’s favorite playwright of the many he patronized. The King’s Men were named grooms of the chamber and were allotted four and one half yards each of scarlet wool for royal livery of doublet, hose and cloak for the coronation parade. Despite his obtaining a coat-of-arms earlier, this was the height of Will’s dreams. Though wool clearly showed they were gentry and not nobility, Will and his fellows had managed to help lift players from their reputations as impoverished, strolling entertainers to admired professional men.

Instead of profitable royal command performances but twice a year, the King’s Men put on fourteen plays during each of the next few years as Will wrote like a madman, whether at the house next to the Globe, at his Silver Street chamber where Edmund lived, or, most often, with me in my chambers at Blackfriars. The Earl of Southampton had completely charmed Queen Anne, and many of Will’s works saw revivals at Southampton House before the royal family and an adoring crowd of courtiers. Southampton did not forget his promise of gratitude to both of us, for I was always invited to these grand and elaborate events. Henry, Prince of Wales, loved Italian culture, and so he found me fascinating. Fortunately, Will only became jealous once in a while over that.

The best proof of Will’s favor with the new king and especially with his theatre-loving Queen Anne came when a dire plot threatened king and country. This time, no one, not even Cecil, suspected Will of complicity, despite the fact that one of the key plotters was Robert Catesby, a Warwickshire man. Another conspirator had even leased old Clopton House outside Stratford to lay his plans. Under the leadership of a man named Guy Fawkes, the rebels planned to blow up king and Parliament by igniting barrels of gunpowder in the cellars beneath Westminster.